Interpreters of the Turk: Venetian Dragomans and their Interlocutors in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul

Thirty years ago, Edward Said famously charted out some of the inter-related epistemological principles and methodological procedures that underlie Orientalism as scholarly practice: the conception of Islam as a unified civilization, the collapsing of spatiotemporal distinctions among Islamicate societies, and the treatment of variegated Arabic, Persian, and Turkish texts as a single tradition, regardless of their particular sites of enunciation and modes of transmission. Recent scholarship has allowed us to consider the multiple ways in which a comparable project evolved at the heart of the Ottoman Empire in the course of the sixteenth century, as part of a self-conscious translatio imperii et studii. As historians recently have shown, during the age of Süleyman the Lawgiver (ruled 1520-1566) Ottoman metropolitan elites themselves undertook a massive project of re-appropriation and synthesis of the intellectual fruits of earlier imperial formations, whether Greco-Latin, Arab, Byzantine, or Persian.

Building on this scholarship, my paper considers how early modern Venetian dragomans (diplomatic interpreters) acted as intermediaries between Ottoman courtly elites engaged in imperial self-fashioning and an emerging European-wide Republic of Letters. A reading of several printed and manuscript texts that arose from Istanbul’s diplomatic milieu in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suggests how dragomans’ practices of knowledge production became part of the epistemological and institutional foundations of a late-humanist civilizational discourse about the Ottomans. My paper pays special attention to Della Letteratura de’ Turchi (“On the Literature of the Turks,” Venice, 1688), produced through a collaboration between Venetian diplomats at the Porte, their locally-trained dragomans, and Ottoman scholars and courtiers. By situating this treatise in relation to its Ottoman sources, as well as to dragomans’ translation practices, I argue that the emerging discourse about the Ottomans re-articulated and re-framed an elite Ottoman perspective on the Ottoman Empire’s history and culture.